Sporking WOCM. 1st chapter, when the Mary Sues arise!
P.S. Predak's sporks of the original and finding the ebook of this one for free- do you think I'm going to pay for this eldritch abomination of literature?-were what brought me to do this spork'>
'Ere We Go!
Chapter 1 Soul to soul
We begin with the intro and the infamous fellow soul. I'm going to be honest: this is much better than the previous editions, it's far less pretentious and obnoxious. But there's a series of errors:
Fellow soul,
I truly hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the gods insisted that I be the vessel of truth. I’ve been forced to come right out and say it. We are dead-tragedies of a celestial uprising that destroyed a cosmos. We can no longer call Earth, Dukas, Redbone, Langormar, or whatever world you were from, our homes. But the revelation of this carnage was not meant to be the beginning of my tale.
Allow me, your spirited storyteller, to take you back to a period more than 14,000 seasons ago, to a series of Peaks that were lived just before the Great Destruction of Everything Known. Forgive me, for I must start my story on an inferior planet that was once known as Earth.
Your friend and fellow soul inside the Book of Immortality,
Phillip E. Jones
1)Doge still keeps the super-mega original title for his apocalypse (I guess you can add a hundred pages of extra content but coming with an original name is impossible. UNTHINKABLE! amirite?) Seriously, this rubs me wrong as a write who actually came up with a doomsday name. It shouldn't be so hard and you can even go and borrow an already existent name: the War In heaven, the Titanomachy, etc.
2) You're saying that you didn't intend this news about dying but you start with them anyway! You dolt, start speaking about this pseudo-Ragnarok of yours and mention your deaths as a side note or something! The author himself recognizes his isn't telling the story properly!
3) You drop random names. Will we met a sould and/or being from Langormar or any other world aside our three 'heroes'? Fuck no, Doge wants us to admire his almighty snowflakes. So unnecessary information.
4) What's this book of immortality? Well, those that read Predak's sporks remember it as a weird XXL soul-jar where all beings of the previous universes rest. He doesn't mention in this ed. (Nor mentions that seasons are years and peaks of bailem or simply peaks are days). Sooo I'm going to drink for info omission, not in the good sense, and because I need it to get going.
\~/ \~/ \~/ \~/
We get a CGI photo of Sam Goodrich McSociopath and a bold headline telling us that we are in Los Angeles. Will we see anything of Los Angeles? Nope.
Sam puts an stethoscope in a boy's chest to see if he's in good health... somehow. I'm not a doctor but I doubt putting a cold piece of metal that let's you hear his heartbeat clearly is of any use.
He's toned down a bit: we still have the legendary Sam was muscular, with chiseled abs, which many women found to be their personal definition of perfection. At five-foot nine, 190 pounds, he was in amazing shape, and his cardio was exemplary. To which I'm taking two drinks \~/ \~/ but he's desuefied a bit. There's still the unbelievable musculature he exhibits for such an overweight: at that height he ought to weigh maximum a total 168 pounds. Hell, my overweight is far better than his and still I have a mighty belly. Author fail at research. \~/
We get non-sequiturs about how SPESHUL and DARK he's. We get the whole cage-fighter thingy and what amounts to the biggest robbery of commas since the Twilight Saga. There are like nine or ten in a single sentence! Salvajín surely was drinking or wanking Doge's wiener while this happened. \~/
We get our good share of homoerotic undertones too, since no EPIC adventure can go without them. Ask Eragon if you don't believe me. We get pearls like this: learning his body could be bent in ways that he never imagined because that doesn't leave room to misinterpretation at all! \~/
Blablabla Exposition, more undertones, silliness incarnate blablabla.
We get the other Gary Stu cornestones: the doctor. Not the time-lord, which surely is better developed despite his godly powers. He graduated high school at the age of 10, earned his Bachelor’s in Science at 13 and his medical degree just before turning 16. In short, Sam was a walking book of knowledge. His unparalleled ability to retain data amazed his professors and the world-but Sam often failed to show his brilliance.
As you can see that part is the same, edition after edition. It's bullshit at its highest, making the character totally unrelatable just after four or five paragraphs and just one quote of him being an asshole. \~/ \~/
One thing that I find funny is the failing to show his brilliance thingy: HE SHOWS NONE EVER. He's a mentally challenged stupid asshole! Even fucking Khornate Berserkers, assholes completely gone insane and who cannot thing anything else beyond RIP AND TEAR! and SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE! show more restrained and less aggressiveness. But I digress.
We get that he 'attempts' to be dumb and study the minimum to appease his father who milk his potential. He 'holds back'... by getting a medical degree by 16. Fortunately the courts, to his father chagrin and rage, decide he can be a doctor yet. Instead of being happy he goes out of the court screaming 'You fool will pay for this!' Because that's something anyone will do! \~/
Sam goes from bad to worse, gets arrested once, and needs a counselor who recommends him to beat the shit out of things to manage his anger. Uhm... Things don't go that way, Doge. Via that method the aforementioned Berserkers should be sane.
And before you mention anything, THAT is his true face. Does it look sane to you?
So Sam discovers that Khorne has his attention as he is savage in the fight and loves the thrill of combat. One day he will collect SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE! and hear voices in his head, mark my words.
Then his father builds him a WHOLE hospital of twelve stories (one less than the previous edition, for some reason) and gets a lot of media coverage. Sam is a dick to his father and that's it before Doge intervenes and info-dumps us about how famous the hospital became thanks to Sam because... some reason. Look Doge, things don't go that way. People may be interested in a doctor so young or with such a dirty record but a novice who lacks motivation, has had his problems, and has done no noteworthy works or operations cannot be at all such a bonus to a hospital-on the contrary perhaps. \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/
Tonight is the match and we he speaks to the receptionist, commenting that her girlfriend ( a friend, not her lover, duh \~/ ) is anxious to see him fight and we are directly told that Sam is having an affair, told in the most dickish way possible and that the woman he's talking to is an utter bitch.\~/
It's wonderful, just see the moral values this characters are imparting on us. Following the wonderful example of this paragon, I cheated my girlfriend with two women and harassed my granny for wanting the best for me! (sarcasm mode off)\~/
He goes to the MGM Grand Arena (because we all know they are always willing to host newbies) and he gets an unreasonable amount of media coverage because of reasons. Oh... wait, now I can think why! He's SPESHUL! So everyone needs to leave whatever shits they are doing and pay attention to his motherfucking chiseled abs!
People appear to adore this turd, he gets offers of marriages in poorly written prose and we get another jewel: Like most red-blooded males, Sam surveyed the woman’s figure Predak's edition said like any red-blooded male, assuming that gay men had FABULOUS! purple blood. I'm assuming Sam is FABULOUS! too, for he doesn't pay attention to the tits but how ugly her teeth are. Wonderful, he doesn't care of the exterior beauty, ladies and gentlemen! He searches for the inner beauty... the gum's beauty. \~/ \~/
Sam is ambushed by a reporter. I need to comment this: the product placement has been toned down several notches. Up to this point there were like four or five brands, including suits of Channel (even though Channel doesn't do suits). In so far there was only one product placement, two if you count the whole hammering of the pay-per-view the narration keeps mentioning.
I'm digressing again.
The lady starts all 'nice' but quickly gets serious and mentions how 'mysterious' he is and asks Sam what are his motivations for breaking the hipocratic. This is Sam's reaction: Sam searched for a response to Martha’s inquiry, but he was left speechless. The depth of her probing made him realize he could not answer because he did not understand the conflict within his own heart. A bottle goes to this and...
Idiot!
He has no conflict whatsoever! Look, I'm going to leave this to an expert who can explain it better than me:
That's it! He is only interested in bloodshed and mayhem! He is just a mindless savage! HE.IS.A.FOOL.
I'm being rough? Perhaps, but he sounds really dickish and full of himself. With the whole cuckold thing he lost all the favor I could have for him.
He runs, being unable to give a simple answer and prepares for the match while commenting on the 'audacity' of the woman. This somehow is worse than the term used in the previous edition in that gives a slight feeling that the woman is overstepping some kind of bounds she wasn't allowed too. Dunno, got a feeling of misogynist. \~/ \~/
He goes on whimpering about his friend John who's not here. His daughter FANNY-who the fuck names his daughter Fanny in this day and age- is in the hospital. Sam says a prayer and hopes she doesn't end up paralyzed. This might have moved me if it weren't for all the Assholia Bastarditis he has exhibited so far and the fact that all this characters won't be mentioned ever again.
We get to the fight already. Doge hasn't given the brazilian a name nor changed the fact he does Muay Thai-Brazilians mostly favor Brazilian jujitsu, which hurts as fuck I can assure you-, I will name him Fausto because insofar he's a far more relatable character than any of the POV characters. He starts bad, vomiting and nervous, but gets his act and becomes the Cypher Raige of after Earth, feeling nothing and forbidding his endocrine system to pump adrenaline... somehow and for some reason. Because anyone can do that. Don't pay attention to your biology teachers, boys, you can control your erections at will! \~/ \~/
His record hasn't changed at all 12-0, which makes me thing he's rigged the results of all the previous matches. That or he earns extra points of sueness, and he has enough of them for just the 1st chapter.
A fight scene follows and it's decently good. It has a few points were the author clearly doesn't know what the hell he's saying and some others though are physically possible don't fit into a fight with that pacing or don't belong to the disciplines this two trained. The pacing, how long do they take to attack at each other, is a bit off, too.\~/ \~/
Fausto tells him Sam's not ready-because Mixed Martial Arts allow the fighters to speak and they aren't impeded by the mouth pieces- and this makes Sam really angry, as in murderous angry. His 'inner demon'-which I assume is Khorne, god of battle and bloodshed, who's bored at the time- orders him to kill Fausto. Sam nearly does so, even going as far as yelling for the right of his head. Oh boy, you ain't ready to harvest SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!
This bothers me a lot, leaving aside my fandom for the 40k universe (where this is as irrelevant as cutting yourself with a pair of scissors), no normal being would do this and obviously the idea of beating the everliving crap of other's isn't doing much of a favor to Sam's mental stability. \~/ \~/
The crowd apparently ignores the fact that Sam nearly murdered his opponent and lose their minds for him. He gets aplauded, acts like a dick (going as far as saying that having respect for the opponent is a stupid cliché) and patronizes the fellow doctor who's patching him, despite Sam has broken what is the most sacred promise of his office.
He feels weird, thinking he got hit really hard and faints. A random dude says: your wish is granted.
Which brings me to one of the most shocking things of this book's prose: The unspoken question was WTF?
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WHY!? WHY!? This isn't a fucking Messenger or twitter! You need to write thing properly. Damn you, Doge! Curse you,goddamn Salvajín!
( Two minutes of heavy breathing and a broken chair and hand latter)
FIIINE... Everyone else passes out and the weird fellow approaches Sam to deliver a massive and obvious foreshadowing, killing any kind of mystery and tension because we know for certain we will be told things. The fellow is really obnoxious, needless to say.
And this is Sam's part of the chapter. I'm leaving it at this and will continue with the other two bitchbags another day. I will drop the drinking because I nearly had a heart attack this afternoon from drinking so much.
(The next day, after the proper brain scrubbing and lobotomization)
Back to work!
Now it's Shalee Adamson's turn! For those veterans of WOCM sporks there are two news: the good is that, though the narrative still mentions that Shalee has a thick texan accent, the author had the mercy to spare us that annoyance-apparently Doge realized he doesn't know to write accents. The bad new is that Shalee still appears in this novel and IS.STILL.STUPID. She doesn't play no role whatsoever in the story as a whole. She's there to be Sam's personal baby oven. So I'm going to skim through her part and go straight to call her DLI-dessignated love interest.
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IT'S WORSE THAN THE BEFORE!!!!!!!!!!
DLI is more MARY-SUEY! A daughter of rednecks-whom Doge bashes mercilessly for some reason- who enters the university, graduates with honors and gets a job while being in the 1st year of her career as an architect, has a massive income- which is deduced from the amount of product placement-and does community work WHILE getting a master and working, and still has time to waste around!
Okay, during the night she goes to her luxurious and beautiful apartment. We get a boatload of product placement, a prophetic dream-to show how SPESHUL DLI is- to advance the plot, because Doge is too lazy to make it advance on his own. The dream goes as an angel is captured and two beings of 'magnificent power' fight for her- she apparently flunked the self-defense classes- and we get extra pearls:
Ha!” the dark leader scoffed. “As if you have the power to defeat me! This is my plane ... my domain. Go back and beg to live in his good graces, for you won’t find peace here.”
“The door has been shut,” the chivalrous leader retorted. He dropped his sword to his side. “There’s nothing to return to. If you have the nerve, let’s settle this.”
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WHAT.THE.HELL.ARE.YOU.FUCKING.TALKING.ABOUT.
This is just stupid, poorly written and completely incoherent, it has absolute no context in the book and it's awkward at best. And there are worse things to pick up. But I don't dare to.
The battle rages on, worlds get destroyed-somehow- as the fight escalates, and Chanice appears and gets destroyed-don't know exactly how and why, I guess it's just to endear us to airhead, which won't work if you've read the previous editions already. She sees an elder woman (SPOILERS AHEAD) that will be Helga Kolinsky, her master and the only German-Russian in that world.
DLI wakes up saying that she switched bodies with the angel... somehow and for some reason. DLI questions this ignoring that it's a dream and dreams are meant to be weird as fuck. DLI act like a retarded-including sassy winks to herself for no reason at all- She starts to feel weird, and losses her consciousness. The fellow that put Sam to sleep appears, makes his usual EPIC FORESHADOWING!!! (DUN DUN DUN) And some weirdness.
“Your wish is granted, my lady,” the dwarf chuckled. “I wonder why the Collective chose you? I bet he had something to do with this.” Wiping the blood off her face, he critiqued her beauty. “You don’t appear to be special.”
The dwarf reached out and played with Shalee’s lips like she was his puppet. “Thank you for stealing me on my birthday, Mr. scary dwarf-man,” he made her say. “This is the best birthday ever!”
After amusing himself for a bit longer, the dwarf refocused. “No matter his intentions, I shall discover the truth of your function soon enough. You must be more to him than a baby maker.”
Leaning forward to touch Shalee’s chin, her body vanished. The dwarf’s eyes flickered, and the home exploded. Laughter was all that was left behind as the neighborhood shook. Shalee would be left in a coma and placed in storage for later use.
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My reaction.
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NO, seriously? Am I the only one crepeed by the dwarf playing with her? This is some messed up shit! Also, why in hell does the apartment explode!? (Rants furiously for ten minutes)
In addition we get the confirmation of DLI's great role in the book-the whole series, actually: make MOAR babies!
Also, there are several mistakes on the text as a whole.
Sigh...Moving on...
We get our last dunk dunk, this time to George's life. George is, to those that don't know this, Doge's own self-insert. I'm not shitting you, people.
Okay, let's start: there's a CGI photo of George-it's ugly as fuck, like the other three.
It starts with this: GEORGE NAILER, AN ATHLETIC, clean-cut, blue-eyed man was sitting on the bed next to his sleeping daughter as he ran his fingers lovingly through her hair. She was his everything. They had spent the day going from store to store looking for the cupcake maker she had been asking for over the last month.
First off: it's the formatting is awful, and I think this is going to be a recurring element of the book's aesthetics. Second: GIVE.US.A.REAL.DESCRIPTION. Third: the whole thing of caressing her daughter somehow comes across as creepy. Fourth: I don't give a flying fuck about this character yet and Abbie-his daughter- will be barely mentioned in the book, nor will his father think of her much.
We get useless info dumping that serves no purporse at all and we get to the creation of yet another Mary Sue. He's the tortured, the mistreated one.
George knew he was emotionally scarred, and at the early age of 10, he turned to hustling to acquire the things his mother needed. He perfected his skills of manipulation to help her pay the rent, yet despite his best efforts, his mother often wasted the money on her habit. It was not her fault. His father was to blame for her addiction-everything was his fault.
Mastery of something at a really early age? Check. Tortured childhood? Check. Bad things happen but are never his fault? You can bloody well check that. And for the record: if things go as the previous editions, we won't ever see him acting as a master manipulator.
He finally flips out at age 15 and tries to kill his father saying things like: You’ll never touch me again! I’m not your toy! because it doesn't sound bad at all, amirite?
George gets five months of juvenile prison and his father gets fifteen!-for some reason.
Well, I'm not really interested in his backstory, to be honest. Bottomline: he's divorced and has spend his live being a leech with women. He's a salesman who: The RV he planned to sell was fully loaded, right down to the 40-inch, flat-screen TV with satellite. George opened the door, bounded up the steps and headed for the window on the far side of the cabin. He removed the price sticker, and after a couple hours of careful manipulation, he had made a few perfect adjustments. He now had a new price, one almost $30,000 dollars over list-$970,000-and he would be damned if he did not hold to every penny.
Leaving the massive amount of product placement that has taken place in the previous paragraphs, this just feels like he needed literally hours just to change the price-which apparently requires 'careful manipulation'. DUH.
He has a curious way of talking: She was class with a capital “C” and victim with a capital “V”. Because that's how people talk nowadays.
He 'seduces'-somehow his half-assed attempts, which are described as if they were master tactics, work out- the client and bangs her. Next day he leaves her, taking her car to go with yet another woman, giving us a hindsight of why her ex-wife wanted the divorce and why his life is a train-wreck.
The woman in question turns to be yet again the fellow that drugged Sam and DLI. His car explodes and we get detailed information about the dimensions of the explosion... in feet. This may not be a problem to Americans but here in Europe we use real units of measure! Bullshit aside, it's annoying to make the conversion, specially when it doesn't tell us anything. He disappears and that's it.
The chapter ends this way: Well, fellow soul … I don’t know if you’re one of the souls who can remember old Earth, but those were the events that happened there more than 14,000 seasons ago. Allow me to take you forward to a whole new world:
THE WORLD
OF GRAYHAM
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YOU.RUINED.ALL.POSSIBLE.TENSION.ASS. Not only breaks the flow with the fellow soul thingy and the remembrance of earth. It comes across as pretentious, specially the last part. Let alone how weird is the 'the chapter ends this way'.
Nevermind, there's much rage to be generated and there's a lot of WOCM to do. In so far I've done the first 30-40 pages and there's virtually no character development and the plot has yet to truly start. This book pacing is worse than the previous editions because it adds more shit to boggle the flow.
'Ere We Go!
Chapter 1 Soul to soul
We begin with the intro and the infamous fellow soul. I'm going to be honest: this is much better than the previous editions, it's far less pretentious and obnoxious. But there's a series of errors:
Fellow soul,
I truly hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the gods insisted that I be the vessel of truth. I’ve been forced to come right out and say it. We are dead-tragedies of a celestial uprising that destroyed a cosmos. We can no longer call Earth, Dukas, Redbone, Langormar, or whatever world you were from, our homes. But the revelation of this carnage was not meant to be the beginning of my tale.
Allow me, your spirited storyteller, to take you back to a period more than 14,000 seasons ago, to a series of Peaks that were lived just before the Great Destruction of Everything Known. Forgive me, for I must start my story on an inferior planet that was once known as Earth.
Your friend and fellow soul inside the Book of Immortality,
Phillip E. Jones
1)Doge still keeps the super-mega original title for his apocalypse (I guess you can add a hundred pages of extra content but coming with an original name is impossible. UNTHINKABLE! amirite?) Seriously, this rubs me wrong as a write who actually came up with a doomsday name. It shouldn't be so hard and you can even go and borrow an already existent name: the War In heaven, the Titanomachy, etc.
2) You're saying that you didn't intend this news about dying but you start with them anyway! You dolt, start speaking about this pseudo-Ragnarok of yours and mention your deaths as a side note or something! The author himself recognizes his isn't telling the story properly!
3) You drop random names. Will we met a sould and/or being from Langormar or any other world aside our three 'heroes'? Fuck no, Doge wants us to admire his almighty snowflakes. So unnecessary information.
4) What's this book of immortality? Well, those that read Predak's sporks remember it as a weird XXL soul-jar where all beings of the previous universes rest. He doesn't mention in this ed. (Nor mentions that seasons are years and peaks of bailem or simply peaks are days). Sooo I'm going to drink for info omission, not in the good sense, and because I need it to get going.
\~/ \~/ \~/ \~/
We get a CGI photo of Sam Goodrich McSociopath and a bold headline telling us that we are in Los Angeles. Will we see anything of Los Angeles? Nope.
Sam puts an stethoscope in a boy's chest to see if he's in good health... somehow. I'm not a doctor but I doubt putting a cold piece of metal that let's you hear his heartbeat clearly is of any use.
He's toned down a bit: we still have the legendary Sam was muscular, with chiseled abs, which many women found to be their personal definition of perfection. At five-foot nine, 190 pounds, he was in amazing shape, and his cardio was exemplary. To which I'm taking two drinks \~/ \~/ but he's desuefied a bit. There's still the unbelievable musculature he exhibits for such an overweight: at that height he ought to weigh maximum a total 168 pounds. Hell, my overweight is far better than his and still I have a mighty belly. Author fail at research. \~/
We get non-sequiturs about how SPESHUL and DARK he's. We get the whole cage-fighter thingy and what amounts to the biggest robbery of commas since the Twilight Saga. There are like nine or ten in a single sentence! Salvajín surely was drinking or wanking Doge's wiener while this happened. \~/
We get our good share of homoerotic undertones too, since no EPIC adventure can go without them. Ask Eragon if you don't believe me. We get pearls like this: learning his body could be bent in ways that he never imagined because that doesn't leave room to misinterpretation at all! \~/
Blablabla Exposition, more undertones, silliness incarnate blablabla.
We get the other Gary Stu cornestones: the doctor. Not the time-lord, which surely is better developed despite his godly powers. He graduated high school at the age of 10, earned his Bachelor’s in Science at 13 and his medical degree just before turning 16. In short, Sam was a walking book of knowledge. His unparalleled ability to retain data amazed his professors and the world-but Sam often failed to show his brilliance.
As you can see that part is the same, edition after edition. It's bullshit at its highest, making the character totally unrelatable just after four or five paragraphs and just one quote of him being an asshole. \~/ \~/
One thing that I find funny is the failing to show his brilliance thingy: HE SHOWS NONE EVER. He's a mentally challenged stupid asshole! Even fucking Khornate Berserkers, assholes completely gone insane and who cannot thing anything else beyond RIP AND TEAR! and SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE! show more restrained and less aggressiveness. But I digress.
We get that he 'attempts' to be dumb and study the minimum to appease his father who milk his potential. He 'holds back'... by getting a medical degree by 16. Fortunately the courts, to his father chagrin and rage, decide he can be a doctor yet. Instead of being happy he goes out of the court screaming 'You fool will pay for this!' Because that's something anyone will do! \~/
Sam goes from bad to worse, gets arrested once, and needs a counselor who recommends him to beat the shit out of things to manage his anger. Uhm... Things don't go that way, Doge. Via that method the aforementioned Berserkers should be sane.
And before you mention anything, THAT is his true face. Does it look sane to you?
So Sam discovers that Khorne has his attention as he is savage in the fight and loves the thrill of combat. One day he will collect SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE! and hear voices in his head, mark my words.
Then his father builds him a WHOLE hospital of twelve stories (one less than the previous edition, for some reason) and gets a lot of media coverage. Sam is a dick to his father and that's it before Doge intervenes and info-dumps us about how famous the hospital became thanks to Sam because... some reason. Look Doge, things don't go that way. People may be interested in a doctor so young or with such a dirty record but a novice who lacks motivation, has had his problems, and has done no noteworthy works or operations cannot be at all such a bonus to a hospital-on the contrary perhaps. \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/
Tonight is the match and we he speaks to the receptionist, commenting that her girlfriend ( a friend, not her lover, duh \~/ ) is anxious to see him fight and we are directly told that Sam is having an affair, told in the most dickish way possible and that the woman he's talking to is an utter bitch.\~/
It's wonderful, just see the moral values this characters are imparting on us. Following the wonderful example of this paragon, I cheated my girlfriend with two women and harassed my granny for wanting the best for me! (sarcasm mode off)\~/
He goes to the MGM Grand Arena (because we all know they are always willing to host newbies) and he gets an unreasonable amount of media coverage because of reasons. Oh... wait, now I can think why! He's SPESHUL! So everyone needs to leave whatever shits they are doing and pay attention to his motherfucking chiseled abs!
People appear to adore this turd, he gets offers of marriages in poorly written prose and we get another jewel: Like most red-blooded males, Sam surveyed the woman’s figure Predak's edition said like any red-blooded male, assuming that gay men had FABULOUS! purple blood. I'm assuming Sam is FABULOUS! too, for he doesn't pay attention to the tits but how ugly her teeth are. Wonderful, he doesn't care of the exterior beauty, ladies and gentlemen! He searches for the inner beauty... the gum's beauty. \~/ \~/
Sam is ambushed by a reporter. I need to comment this: the product placement has been toned down several notches. Up to this point there were like four or five brands, including suits of Channel (even though Channel doesn't do suits). In so far there was only one product placement, two if you count the whole hammering of the pay-per-view the narration keeps mentioning.
I'm digressing again.
The lady starts all 'nice' but quickly gets serious and mentions how 'mysterious' he is and asks Sam what are his motivations for breaking the hipocratic. This is Sam's reaction: Sam searched for a response to Martha’s inquiry, but he was left speechless. The depth of her probing made him realize he could not answer because he did not understand the conflict within his own heart. A bottle goes to this and...
Idiot!
He has no conflict whatsoever! Look, I'm going to leave this to an expert who can explain it better than me:
Click to viewThat's it! He is only interested in bloodshed and mayhem! He is just a mindless savage! HE.IS.A.FOOL.
I'm being rough? Perhaps, but he sounds really dickish and full of himself. With the whole cuckold thing he lost all the favor I could have for him.
He runs, being unable to give a simple answer and prepares for the match while commenting on the 'audacity' of the woman. This somehow is worse than the term used in the previous edition in that gives a slight feeling that the woman is overstepping some kind of bounds she wasn't allowed too. Dunno, got a feeling of misogynist. \~/ \~/
He goes on whimpering about his friend John who's not here. His daughter FANNY-who the fuck names his daughter Fanny in this day and age- is in the hospital. Sam says a prayer and hopes she doesn't end up paralyzed. This might have moved me if it weren't for all the Assholia Bastarditis he has exhibited so far and the fact that all this characters won't be mentioned ever again.
We get to the fight already. Doge hasn't given the brazilian a name nor changed the fact he does Muay Thai-Brazilians mostly favor Brazilian jujitsu, which hurts as fuck I can assure you-, I will name him Fausto because insofar he's a far more relatable character than any of the POV characters. He starts bad, vomiting and nervous, but gets his act and becomes the Cypher Raige of after Earth, feeling nothing and forbidding his endocrine system to pump adrenaline... somehow and for some reason. Because anyone can do that. Don't pay attention to your biology teachers, boys, you can control your erections at will! \~/ \~/
His record hasn't changed at all 12-0, which makes me thing he's rigged the results of all the previous matches. That or he earns extra points of sueness, and he has enough of them for just the 1st chapter.
A fight scene follows and it's decently good. It has a few points were the author clearly doesn't know what the hell he's saying and some others though are physically possible don't fit into a fight with that pacing or don't belong to the disciplines this two trained. The pacing, how long do they take to attack at each other, is a bit off, too.\~/ \~/
Fausto tells him Sam's not ready-because Mixed Martial Arts allow the fighters to speak and they aren't impeded by the mouth pieces- and this makes Sam really angry, as in murderous angry. His 'inner demon'-which I assume is Khorne, god of battle and bloodshed, who's bored at the time- orders him to kill Fausto. Sam nearly does so, even going as far as yelling for the right of his head. Oh boy, you ain't ready to harvest SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!
This bothers me a lot, leaving aside my fandom for the 40k universe (where this is as irrelevant as cutting yourself with a pair of scissors), no normal being would do this and obviously the idea of beating the everliving crap of other's isn't doing much of a favor to Sam's mental stability. \~/ \~/
The crowd apparently ignores the fact that Sam nearly murdered his opponent and lose their minds for him. He gets aplauded, acts like a dick (going as far as saying that having respect for the opponent is a stupid cliché) and patronizes the fellow doctor who's patching him, despite Sam has broken what is the most sacred promise of his office.
He feels weird, thinking he got hit really hard and faints. A random dude says: your wish is granted.
Which brings me to one of the most shocking things of this book's prose: The unspoken question was WTF?
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WHY!? WHY!? This isn't a fucking Messenger or twitter! You need to write thing properly. Damn you, Doge! Curse you,goddamn Salvajín!
( Two minutes of heavy breathing and a broken chair and hand latter)
FIIINE... Everyone else passes out and the weird fellow approaches Sam to deliver a massive and obvious foreshadowing, killing any kind of mystery and tension because we know for certain we will be told things. The fellow is really obnoxious, needless to say.
And this is Sam's part of the chapter. I'm leaving it at this and will continue with the other two bitchbags another day. I will drop the drinking because I nearly had a heart attack this afternoon from drinking so much.
(The next day, after the proper brain scrubbing and lobotomization)
Back to work!
Now it's Shalee Adamson's turn! For those veterans of WOCM sporks there are two news: the good is that, though the narrative still mentions that Shalee has a thick texan accent, the author had the mercy to spare us that annoyance-apparently Doge realized he doesn't know to write accents. The bad new is that Shalee still appears in this novel and IS.STILL.STUPID. She doesn't play no role whatsoever in the story as a whole. She's there to be Sam's personal baby oven. So I'm going to skim through her part and go straight to call her DLI-dessignated love interest.
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IT'S WORSE THAN THE BEFORE!!!!!!!!!!
DLI is more MARY-SUEY! A daughter of rednecks-whom Doge bashes mercilessly for some reason- who enters the university, graduates with honors and gets a job while being in the 1st year of her career as an architect, has a massive income- which is deduced from the amount of product placement-and does community work WHILE getting a master and working, and still has time to waste around!
Okay, during the night she goes to her luxurious and beautiful apartment. We get a boatload of product placement, a prophetic dream-to show how SPESHUL DLI is- to advance the plot, because Doge is too lazy to make it advance on his own. The dream goes as an angel is captured and two beings of 'magnificent power' fight for her- she apparently flunked the self-defense classes- and we get extra pearls:
Ha!” the dark leader scoffed. “As if you have the power to defeat me! This is my plane ... my domain. Go back and beg to live in his good graces, for you won’t find peace here.”
“The door has been shut,” the chivalrous leader retorted. He dropped his sword to his side. “There’s nothing to return to. If you have the nerve, let’s settle this.”
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WHAT.THE.HELL.ARE.YOU.FUCKING.TALKING.ABOUT.
This is just stupid, poorly written and completely incoherent, it has absolute no context in the book and it's awkward at best. And there are worse things to pick up. But I don't dare to.
The battle rages on, worlds get destroyed-somehow- as the fight escalates, and Chanice appears and gets destroyed-don't know exactly how and why, I guess it's just to endear us to airhead, which won't work if you've read the previous editions already. She sees an elder woman (SPOILERS AHEAD) that will be Helga Kolinsky, her master and the only German-Russian in that world.
DLI wakes up saying that she switched bodies with the angel... somehow and for some reason. DLI questions this ignoring that it's a dream and dreams are meant to be weird as fuck. DLI act like a retarded-including sassy winks to herself for no reason at all- She starts to feel weird, and losses her consciousness. The fellow that put Sam to sleep appears, makes his usual EPIC FORESHADOWING!!! (DUN DUN DUN) And some weirdness.
“Your wish is granted, my lady,” the dwarf chuckled. “I wonder why the Collective chose you? I bet he had something to do with this.” Wiping the blood off her face, he critiqued her beauty. “You don’t appear to be special.”
The dwarf reached out and played with Shalee’s lips like she was his puppet. “Thank you for stealing me on my birthday, Mr. scary dwarf-man,” he made her say. “This is the best birthday ever!”
After amusing himself for a bit longer, the dwarf refocused. “No matter his intentions, I shall discover the truth of your function soon enough. You must be more to him than a baby maker.”
Leaning forward to touch Shalee’s chin, her body vanished. The dwarf’s eyes flickered, and the home exploded. Laughter was all that was left behind as the neighborhood shook. Shalee would be left in a coma and placed in storage for later use.
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My reaction.
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NO, seriously? Am I the only one crepeed by the dwarf playing with her? This is some messed up shit! Also, why in hell does the apartment explode!? (Rants furiously for ten minutes)
In addition we get the confirmation of DLI's great role in the book-the whole series, actually: make MOAR babies!
Also, there are several mistakes on the text as a whole.
Sigh...Moving on...
We get our last dunk dunk, this time to George's life. George is, to those that don't know this, Doge's own self-insert. I'm not shitting you, people.
Okay, let's start: there's a CGI photo of George-it's ugly as fuck, like the other three.
It starts with this: GEORGE NAILER, AN ATHLETIC, clean-cut, blue-eyed man was sitting on the bed next to his sleeping daughter as he ran his fingers lovingly through her hair. She was his everything. They had spent the day going from store to store looking for the cupcake maker she had been asking for over the last month.
First off: it's the formatting is awful, and I think this is going to be a recurring element of the book's aesthetics. Second: GIVE.US.A.REAL.DESCRIPTION. Third: the whole thing of caressing her daughter somehow comes across as creepy. Fourth: I don't give a flying fuck about this character yet and Abbie-his daughter- will be barely mentioned in the book, nor will his father think of her much.
We get useless info dumping that serves no purporse at all and we get to the creation of yet another Mary Sue. He's the tortured, the mistreated one.
George knew he was emotionally scarred, and at the early age of 10, he turned to hustling to acquire the things his mother needed. He perfected his skills of manipulation to help her pay the rent, yet despite his best efforts, his mother often wasted the money on her habit. It was not her fault. His father was to blame for her addiction-everything was his fault.
Mastery of something at a really early age? Check. Tortured childhood? Check. Bad things happen but are never his fault? You can bloody well check that. And for the record: if things go as the previous editions, we won't ever see him acting as a master manipulator.
He finally flips out at age 15 and tries to kill his father saying things like: You’ll never touch me again! I’m not your toy! because it doesn't sound bad at all, amirite?
George gets five months of juvenile prison and his father gets fifteen!-for some reason.
Well, I'm not really interested in his backstory, to be honest. Bottomline: he's divorced and has spend his live being a leech with women. He's a salesman who: The RV he planned to sell was fully loaded, right down to the 40-inch, flat-screen TV with satellite. George opened the door, bounded up the steps and headed for the window on the far side of the cabin. He removed the price sticker, and after a couple hours of careful manipulation, he had made a few perfect adjustments. He now had a new price, one almost $30,000 dollars over list-$970,000-and he would be damned if he did not hold to every penny.
Leaving the massive amount of product placement that has taken place in the previous paragraphs, this just feels like he needed literally hours just to change the price-which apparently requires 'careful manipulation'. DUH.
He has a curious way of talking: She was class with a capital “C” and victim with a capital “V”. Because that's how people talk nowadays.
He 'seduces'-somehow his half-assed attempts, which are described as if they were master tactics, work out- the client and bangs her. Next day he leaves her, taking her car to go with yet another woman, giving us a hindsight of why her ex-wife wanted the divorce and why his life is a train-wreck.
The woman in question turns to be yet again the fellow that drugged Sam and DLI. His car explodes and we get detailed information about the dimensions of the explosion... in feet. This may not be a problem to Americans but here in Europe we use real units of measure! Bullshit aside, it's annoying to make the conversion, specially when it doesn't tell us anything. He disappears and that's it.
The chapter ends this way: Well, fellow soul … I don’t know if you’re one of the souls who can remember old Earth, but those were the events that happened there more than 14,000 seasons ago. Allow me to take you forward to a whole new world:
THE WORLD
OF GRAYHAM
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YOU.RUINED.ALL.POSSIBLE.TENSION.ASS. Not only breaks the flow with the fellow soul thingy and the remembrance of earth. It comes across as pretentious, specially the last part. Let alone how weird is the 'the chapter ends this way'.
Nevermind, there's much rage to be generated and there's a lot of WOCM to do. In so far I've done the first 30-40 pages and there's virtually no character development and the plot has yet to truly start. This book pacing is worse than the previous editions because it adds more shit to boggle the flow.